Diversity, equity and inclusion are critical to organizations and leaders today more than ever. While gender diversity and inclusion are a specific focus area for many organisations and researchers, little work has been done with respect to alternative gender and sexualities. We undertook an investigation of personality differences in LGBTQ+ managers and are glad to report some of our findings.

The table below presents the effect size or mean differences for 8 personality factors from SPS-MAX in a sample of 192 employees who identified themselves as LGBTQ+. All comparisons were made with the India National Norm of over 998 sample size.

You will notice that while there are many important statistically significant differences, none of them are large differences from a practical standpoint. However, there were interesting patterns when we broke this data point between individuals who are completely out, selectively out and completely closeted. 

We also looked at Adaptive Styles from SPS Max. The differences in means as a function of pooled standard deviation are provided below.

Conclusions

The effect sizes between straight and cis-gender employees vs LGBTQ+ employees indicate that LGBTQ+ employees are more likely to use composure as a means to adapt. There are definite benefits to LGBTQ+ employees due to this adaptive style, e.g. getting along with others, being patient with others, being measured in interpersonal communication and ability to navigate difficult interpersonal situations without dominating over others. They may also impact LGBTQ+ individuals adversely, e.g. inability to speak up against discrimination, being polite even when display of temper may be warranted and lacking assertiveness especially in conflict or negotiations. On other personality factors there were no big differences. Personality differences are smaller than overall individual differences. 

Within the LGBTQ+ community, we see small but critical differences depending on their status with respect to a socialized identity i.e. whether they are out or not.  We find that LGBTQ+ employees who are completely out to their colleagues report being more Compassionate, Open and Creative. Completely out employees feel more Social-agency than those who are selectively out. We hypothesize that being less out is likely to make one acutely aware of their out status which may lead to feeling less in control and confident in social settings. More qualitative research may be warranted with this group. With respect to the adaptive styles we found that completely out individuals favored Composure and Calmness as key means to adapt to adverse situations. As expected, we found completely closeted employees scoring low on all adaptive styles. This may indicate a clear adaptive benefit for being completely out in the workplace. Key questions that interest us are - how do completely closeted individuals adapt? Is there a lack of adaptive competence or is it about an absence of a clear style? Is there a lack of general awareness of the adaptive styles in case of closeted individuals?

Success of human beings as a species ought to be due to higher cognitive functions, social bonding and the ability to be open to new solutions. From an evolutionary standpoint, close-mindedness should not be a matter of individual difference unless nature allowed it to be propagated for certain benefits. Close-mindedness offers certain evolutionary benefits which can be many and in the tradition of evolutionary psychology, we can only guess them. But the discourse leads to important insights into workplace behaviours.

In this article, we discuss close-mindedness and what the SPS research tells us about it. We define close-mindedness as a tendency to prefer established ways of thinking and doing things over looking for, acknowledging and utilising new information in intrapersonal and interpersonal decision-making. Close-mindedness is not just the opposite of open-mindedness and it is important to distinguish. It is easy to consider it a bipolar opposite of openness factor from the Big 5. It is a more complex construct and an important one given how much it impacts social interactions - something that is usually more linked to agreeableness and extraversion factors.

We  asked 247 individuals attending selection interviews who took SPS Scan to rank order what they consider their common workplace challenges. The adjective inventory uses undesirable adjectives mapped to all of the big five factors (from the SPS Scan original item bank) and Likert statements from SPS Scan. All respondents were forced to choose at least 1 and upto 4 from a block of 8 negative phrases (standard SPS Scan format). We looked at individuals who self-reported close-mindedness as a descriptor for themselves and compared them with the Likert statement responses. We report below the top 5 items with highest differences of practical and statistical significance (p<0.01).